Gereon Koch Kapuire

This workshop offers an immersive exploration of ethical co-design practices with indigenous communities, addressing communication barriers and co-constructing a Rural Community Engagement Framework. Seasoned facilitators guide participants through mixed-method methodologies, fostering discussions on co-facilitation and co-publishing. The workshop aims to empower participants to deconstruct Afrocentric research canons and integrate culturally sensitive strategies into their engagements, promoting meaningful co-design collaborations for transformative impact.

Persona is a tool broadly used in technology design to support communicational interactions between designers and users. Different Persona types and methods have evolved mostly in the Global North, and been partially deployed in the Global South every so often in its original User-Centred Design methodology. We postulate persona conceptualizations are expected to differ across cultures. We demonstrate this with an exploratory-case study on user-created persona co-designed with four Namibian ethnic groups: ovaHerero, Ovambo, ovaHimba and Khoisan. We follow a hermeneutic inquiry approach to discern cultural nuances from diverse human conducts. Findings reveal diverse self-representations whereby for each ethnic group results emerge in unalike fashions, viewpoints, recounts and storylines. This paper ultimately argues User-Created Persona as a potentially valid approach for pursuing cross-cultural depictions of personas that communicate cultural features and user experiences paramount to designing acceptable and gratifying technologies in dissimilar locales.